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Joe To Pitchers: Sack Up!

With the addition of Andy Pettitte to the Yankees’ pitching staff, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that there’s not enough room for everybody in the starting rotation. Yesterday, Joe Girardi made it known that he doesn’t care about anyone’s performance in the past or the circumstances of their arrival to the Yanks, just the way they pitch now. He said:

“If you don’t want somebody to take your job, pitch that way. It’s really simple. Let’s say the job was given to you and you were struggling. They’re going to look for someone to give the job to. You have to produce. That’s the world we live in in New York. It’s not like, ‘You’re this guy and we’re going to give you 20 starts no mater what happens.’ We don’t live in that world here.“

In other words, put up or shut up, boys. What a welcome departure from the days of Carl Pavano and Jaret Wright. Michael Pineda’s been struggling with his velocity. Now it’s get it up or off to the bullpen. You can have all the motivational speeches in the world during spring training but nothing’s going to light the fire under a guy’s ass than the threat of losing his job. It’s nice to see athletes getting treated like the rest of us.

Even if Andy sucks, at least we’ll know which guys really deserve to start. But judging from today’s bullpen session and how much he and Russell Martin got each other’s juices flowing (no homo), it looks like Pineda, Phil Hughes, Ivan Nova, and Freddy Garcia are going to have to pick their games up if they want to stay in the rotation.